The soul is an old graveyard. Heaped with the bones of a thousand dead lives, a thousand dead names, a thousand dead dreams… joy and suffering…the memory of a thousand women…brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers… They are all buried out there, nameless and forgotten, un-grieved and untended. It is a landscape that has a memory filled with the dull slap-sound of shovels flattening down the barrows. A shuddering of the loins caws over the hillocks like a spook of crows, sorrow like a rend in the sky. Confusion is storm, pain is lightning, anger is a tremor, love is an orange sunset, wisdom is a peaceful yellow… Understanding and ignorance – a coin tossed into the air.
…The soul is an old graveyard…
I came into this small room, through a door over there. Right here, in the middle, was a table with a page and a typewriter on it. At the right side of the table, stuck, point first into the floor, was a large hunting knife. There was a window open over there. Stuck to it was one of those classic orange vacancy signs blinking on and off. I knew that knife was down there. I reached down to grip it. That fucking knife… Cuts me…every time… I stamped my hand onto the page and the sign went out and when it came back on it said No-Vacancy.
This is reality. The dream is over. I’m awake… The first time I came here was many years ago. I loved it then, and I still do; this is my cinema paradiso.
This is one of the rooms, one of many, in the tenements of writing. We are on about the fifth floor. There are two more floors above me. Just across the way, separated by the canal, is another seven-story tenement building, crammed full with windows looking into small rooms. The canal is one of those that festers the outskirts coming right to the brink on either side. We are at the end of the block.
To the right, out there, stretching out to the horizon lies a vast blue-grey landscape that is cut in half by a canal-lock bridge that spans over a deep gorge. This bridge is the only way to cross to this side. To the left here running up as far away as the eye can see are tenement buildings. I don’t know how far up they go; I am always let off here. On the facing wall, pacing about in dimly lit rooms, there are hundreds of employees. Some are typing…but not many. It looks like a chicken coop of some kind.
Down there, on the canal, there are Gondoleroes, passing back and forth, on gondolas. They stand towering at the back, their huge capes flowing behind them as they work the pole into the water and drive the boats on. Their wide-brimmed hats conceal their faces. They pass there always, day or night.
I remember the first time I was taken here after what seemed like an endless journey, along the canal-ways that wind through the blue-grey reaches, from the other side of the gorge, over the bridge, through the cerebral marshes. I was down there in one of the Gondolas, the boat-man towering over me, as he worked into the pole, the vast landscape, was spread out behind us and there in front, on either side of the canal, right from the brink, were the tenements of writing. Many other boat-men joined us there, from adjacent canals, some empty, some carrying employees. There were many gondolas in front of us driving ahead.
As we passed along the tenements, the windows began to open high up, and suddenly, the whole air was filled with pages. They were fluttering down all around me. The whole sky overhead was blocked out by blueprints, their pages opened out like confetti, like doves, wings spread, fluttering, coming in to roost. None of them hit the water.
The rower let me off at a door that opened onto the lip of the canal and he told me to go in. I walked up the stairwell and went in the first door that was open – for me it is always on the fifth or sixth floor. And always on this side…I don’t know why. I went in. The window was open.
It said “vacancy” then just like this time, always the same. One single page on the table and the hunting knife stuck into the floor. The very first time I tried to pull that knife out of the floor I cut myself. Every time I take that knife out of the floor, by accident, I cut myself. On the page was written my job, my blueprint, and that if I decided to undertake it I should sign below on the dotted line. I did not hesitate a second. I never hesitate. To be in the brotherhood, I thought to myself, was worth anything…I signed that line and, just like this time, the “NO VACANCY”“ appeared and it stopped blinking. Suddenly I realised that I could not really leave this room until the blueprint was completed. It is a contract, a contract that you cannot annul. Everything was different, irrevocable. Like how criminals must feel after the deed. The world is different. The past had been some form of sleep. The white sheet with my signature on it, right there on the dotted line, snug under its wing, shot into its breast. I would never escape it; it would always be there like a ghost when the light was turned off. I could never leave anyway. How? I could steal out and haunt the marshes like one of the phantoms that we saw on the long odyssian journey that eventually brought me here. We passed every manner of creature.
There are horse-like beasts out there that appeared at the canal banks, stubborned against crags, braying and hoofing the yells of unperfected burdens into the water. The moon is more like a surgeon’s optical nerve, a fibre optic, pushed in through the firmament, working around, gawking at the mystery out here… When it appears, the seminal dogs of the outskirts gather on outcrops and bark-out as yet unlived desires. Like the ravenous bird shadowing Hansel I was rowed here under a luminous though unlit skyline.
Finally we come to the front two gable walls of the tenements of writing, one on each side of the canal. It is a long journey’s end through a land both beautiful and terrible. There, on these two gable walls, is written, what the Rower said is our code: Hover above the troubles of the world. Have faith in your strength. Be compassionate and open. You have come down through the generations and generations of mankind. You belong to no nation. You belong to the brotherhood.
It went dark. I could see nothing. Time passed. I was awakened by the sound of a trumpet. There was a thin pile of pages on the table. I heard yells of triumph coming from out there.
Just out the window and there they are, hundreds of them… The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They come from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on.
Confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down to the gondolas. The air is filled with pages, with finished blueprints. The Gondoleros swooping over the pole, driving the Gondolas on. Where to, who knows. The brotherhood doesn’t know. I’m sure of that. They look different on that side of the canal. There is no way for us to cross the canal, and no way for them to get over here. They look like office workers. I’ve even heard that they try to smuggle themselves over here dressed up in rags and scuffed shoes. Nothing annoys me more than a rich kid in purposefully scuffed shoes. You can’t pay off a gondolero. I don’t know why they would want to get over here. Maybe it’s the arabesque hypnogogic seaport, where captains name their ships after drowned women, riddled with polyglot-hustlers, always twilight… The black-dome sky spins like a prostitute’s skirt and the stars flash like lice and flit around a swollen gonorrhoea-moon that always hangs above the old city walls. It is full of toothless painters, actors that never get to act, writers trying to salvage ripped-up pages from among the nets – past the harbour walls is an ink-dead sea.
It’s not like that over there; they are all marked out by time. They start the same time every day and they finish the same time every day. There is one guy over there and he is always there as I arrive, at his desk, groomed, clean, efficient. He never leaves that desk. He is always smiling; he is always typing. He finishes, throws his blueprint out and he watches it, every time, as it opens up, like a quilt on the air, as it goes down and closes into the gondola. And then he is gone. He is usually back again, in the same room, before I even get out of here. writing away, smiling… And then the day comes, as it always does, when he finishes! He opens his window. And down it goes, the blueprint…opening up like a quilt, watching it…all the way down…to the gondolas. The rowers never look up.
I pace the room. I think too much. My heart has an axe in it. I leave, I return, others leave and return, some don’t return. The ones that cannot return have all returned to the one word, and all the years of their gone lives, all those words, those explanations, those hopes, promises, all forged back again into the one word that they started with – their name. I repeat the names of those I love that cannot return, again and again – words that will always be a mystery to me, they fall on me like trees in the forest.
There is a riddle: Only dead fish go with the flow yet struggle against the current and you will eventually drown.
This is the paradox we are all in. Only dead fish go with the flow, only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current…and you will drown.
I came to the point where there are no more signposts – I don’t know if I can do this.
The brotherhood? The muse is the whore of Babylon. The whore for all the babbling poets of the world – mistress to all, deceiver to all! I am Ajax, mad and deluded, slaughtering the sheep; I am Heracles bludgeoning his family; I am Oedipus, the last riddle solved, blinded, walking with three legs, into exile; I am Aristotle’s dramatic alcoholic poets searching the Illiad for what was unsaid; blinded like Homer, like O’Carolan hearing your voice like a distance -either far or near; I am Owen Roe O’Sullivan, after the Geraldines were crushed, added to the Bolg, In the dew of morning, weak indeed, as a Poet, as the pen fell from his hand; I am Rimbaud, abused and spoilt – deranged at the end of Verlain’s nozzle; I am Mahon squinting through the key hole at the disused darkness; I am Heaney of the bog corpses remembering memories that don’t remember themselves; I am the butler’s swan-twilight diminishing, unclamourously, year by year;
I am Keats when with dying burning eyes,
He stared across the Spanish steps -the tongue
Of his twenty six years in wild surmise-
Distraught, cloyed, among cloudy trophies hung.
The great whore of Babylon… It is not love that is evergreen amongst the deciduous but acceptance.
No bank accounts are signed over here. No new bibles to read, no new techniques, no new schools – the cutting edge is a very old blade.
Winter is coming. Flocks of desire, in the geometry of arrowheads, are migrating to the south. The seminal dogs of the outskirts are barking…gondoleros on the canal…in the cerebral-wind flutter the newspaper headlines of old dreams…
Look at them. Hundreds of them… The enchanted children of Hamlen. Here they are. This is where the piper brought them. This is where the melody led. That magic enchanting melody…
The magic mountain…The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They follow the melody from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on. Blueprints, confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down. Bent over the pole, the Gondelero, drives the gondola on, in a long cape and a wide-brimmed hat that conceals his face. He has gone past the outer gable walls. The tenements of writing are now at his back, getting smaller and smaller, as he drives the boat further out. He is taking the blueprint to the line of demarcation, to the border… He passes over this point as he rows into your minds, rowing through the canals of your brains, rowing outwards, outwards from the tenements of writing, rowing into the blue-grey reaches, to some other point where the blueprint can be fitted-out from the wardrobe of your imaginations, in the disguise that will take it over the line of demarcation, over the border, materialised, with you, when you go into the world, into life, into time.
I will finish the blueprint, eventually – even if it kills me. I will get out of here.
The last time I finished, I picked it up and went to the window. That amount of words, I thought to myself, just to get back to the first word that I thought of when I agreed to sign. When I thought about the length of time that had passed I told myself how true it is that in here the flames in the fire of time do not burn. I tossed it out the window without watching it spread out, without watching the Gondolero, without looking out over the landscape, the sky, the brotherhood. I looked at the table again and there was another page sitting on it. The dotted line is here – just listen and follow the melody.
The answer to the riddle, the paradox – only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current and you will drown: there are two rivers. The one out there they call life, and the one in here. The road in…is the only road out. Knife to the floor, man to the door – I lifted the hunting knife and threw it point first into the floor. The No Vacancy went off and then Vacancy blinked on. Just like when the rower told me there was a vacancy – he’s now telling someone else that there is a vacancy and to get into the Gondola. The last time I walked out that door, out of the tenements of writing and back into life, out of here, into time, the last thought I had was: from the venom comes the serum…from the venom comes the serum.
